The present invention relates to storage system environments, and more particularly, to a planning and monitoring tool for optimizing planning, configuration, and monitoring of a particular storage system environment.
Storage system environments have many different components interoperating together, depending on the particular needs and operating conditions that are specified for a particular end user. In order to provide a suitable storage system solution for an end user, a rigorous and time consuming planning process is manually performed by the end user and a storage system provider. During this planning process, an end user's current workload requirements and any known future workload requirements are taken into account when specifying which particular components and how many of certain types of components are to be used in the end user's new or modified storage system environment. When such a storage system solution is installed at the end user, the storage system solution is able to not only handle the current workloads, but also some of the projected workloads into the future.
This method of providing a storage system solution results in a system that is designed to accommodate months to years of usage for the end user without major modifications, assuming consistent customer growth that does not increase beyond a projected growth rate for the lifetime of the system. This currently used process requires a great deal of time exerted by the end user and the storage system provider, along with great subject matter expertise. Also, the assumptions used to design the storage system solution are often discarded or lost after the storage system solution is created and ultimately implemented.